Regimenting Discourse, Controlling Bodies

This article examines, from a critical and ethnographic sociolinguistic perspective, the socio-discursive practices unfolding at the information desk of a Spanish immigration office in Barcelona. Drawing on a corpus of ethnographic materials and interactional data, the article discusses why frontline communication became constituted as it did, what practical routines and ideological considerations grounded it, and how multiple social and institutional orders intersected in the shaping of practical and symbolic gatekeeping. I claim that, through various micro-strategies of control, evaluation and moral hierarchization, the government employees at this bureaucratic agency enacted the disciplinary and exclusionary regime of the nation-state, and socialized their clients into becoming ‘good’ migrants.